Page 56 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

46 Alison Ross

subject—an African opposition figure who had spent time studying in Eu-
rope-^—violates the code: he questions Locke s impartiality and emphasizes
his point by turning the camera around to film the journalist. 14 At this
moment, with Locke's discomfit registered on film, the code is placed in
the foreground as a practice. This foregrounding occurs at one other place
in the film, when, in another scene set in Africa, Locke's wife, Rachel,
challenges the polite tone of Locke's interview on the topic of opposi-
tion forces with the president of an unnamed African country. 15 Whereas
moral beliefs force experience into ill-fitting schémas that become engines
for pathologies of reaction—such as neurosis (Giuliana in 77 deserto rosso)
and predatory eroticism (Sandro in Lavventura)—Locke recasts codified
behavioral patterns (with moral pretensions) into stylized practices of a
purely aesthetic type. This aestheticization then makes possible their aban-
donment, as Locke demonstrates when he takes on Robertson's "empty"
identity. In this respect the film inverts the schema in Blow-Up, which is
epistemological: how do we find a pattern in visual codes where no obvious
pattern presents itself? This approach presupposes that there is a pattern to
be found, although the film admittedly complicates this thesis by drawing
attention to the contingencies involved in the imposition of a pattern; in
The Passenger it is this idea that is put in question as the central character's
project of losing his identity is presented partly as a curiosity about finding
and inhabiting another life but, more fundamentally, as a curiosity about
the "form" of uncoded experience.
Locke provides the definitive statement of this perspective when he
challenges Robertson's view that "every place is the same": "It is us who
remain the same. We translate every situation as we experience it into the
same old codes, we just condition ourselves. . . . However hard you try,
it stays so difficult to get away from your own habits." This statement is
the hypothesis of the film, explored and given vivid aesthetic form by its
episodic construction. 16 Can you leave your habits? Is it possible to have
coherent experiences without a code or a framework to link them into a
meaningful chain? Antonioni proposes an experiment of just this type
by minimizing the presence of causal frameworks, such as motivation, to
code the film's narrative, and by complicating the temporal and spatial
logics between and within sequences. Like Locke, we are encouraged to
struggle against easy, habit-bound interpretations.
Although the girl tries to interpret Locke's project in terms of
his switching of the code of dispassionate observer to that of engaged